CHAPTER XV. BLOOD-SALVATION

_“And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without the shedding of blood there is no remission.”—Heb. 9: 22. “The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.”—! John 1: 5._

IT would be tedious to quote even one-tenth of the passages from the New Testament in which salvation is ascribed to the blood of Jesus. Indeed, from Genesis to Revelation sacrificial blood seems to be the one prominent theme. The salvation of Christ is emphatically the salvation by blood, and this idea runs through the whole system of what is called evangelical theology. Jeremy Taylor wrote about “lapping with the tongue the blood from the Saviour’s open wounds,” suggesting the well-known habit of the bloodthirsty dog. But Mr. Taylor was outdone by the late Rev. Bishop Jesse T. Peck, when he frantically exclaimed, in the presence of thousands of people at a religious mass-meeting, “We have not enough _blood_ in our religion. I want to wade in the blood of Calvary up to my armpits, and _wallow_ in it,” suggesting the well-known habits of the filthy sow. But the Rev. T. D. Talmage, D. D., capped the climax when, in his usual rhapsodical style, he exclaimed in a recent sermon: “It seems to me as if all Heaven were trying to bid in your soul. The first bid it makes is the tears of Christ at the tomb of Lazarus; but that is not a high-enough price. The next bid Heaven makes is the sweat of Gethsemane; but it is too cheap a price. The next bid Heaven makes seems to be the whipped back of Pilate’s Hall; but it is not a high-enough price. Can it be possible that Heaven cannot buy you in? Heaven tries once more. It says: ‘I bid this time for that man’s soul the torture of Christ’s martyrdom, the blood on his temple, the blood on his cheek, the blood on his chin, the blood on his hand, the blood on his side, the blood on his knee, the blood on his foot—the blood in drops, the blood in rills, the blood in pools coagulated beneath the cross; the blood that wet the tips of the soldier’s spear, the blood that plashed warm in the faces of his enemies.’ Glory to God! that bid wins it! The highest price that was ever paid for anything was paid for your soul. Nothing could buy it but blood! The estranged property is bought back. Take it. You have sold yourselves for naught; and ye shall be redeemed without money.’ O atoning blood, cleansing blood, life-giving blood, sanctifying blood, glorifying blood of Jesus! Why not burst into tears at the thought that for thee he shed it—for thee the hard-hearted, for thee the lost?”

Henry III. of England was presented with a small portion of the blood of Jesus, said to have been shed upon the cross, and to have been preserved in a phial, duly attested by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and other distinguished functionaries as genuine. It was carried in triumph through the streets of London with rapturous shoutings by a large procession, from St. Paul’s to Westminster Abbey, and the historian testifies that it made all England radiant with glory. Indeed, there has been enough of the so-called genuine blood that was shed on Calvary given to the faithful to float the largest ship in the navy of Great Britain. A sufficient quantity of the real cross upon which Jesus is said to have been crucified has been preserved to erect the largest temple the world ever contained. There is no end to the superstition on this subject, all going to show how deep-seated is the credulity which exists in the popular belief in regard to this matter.

There are many illustrations which might be given of “blood-evocation” among ancient pagans who regarded blood as the great arcanum of nature.

But what was the _origin_ of the idea that blood is purifying, cleansing, purging? There is nothing in the thing itself that suggests this idea. Take a basinful of newly-drawn blood and set it upon the table before you. It soon coagulates, and emits an offensive odor, so that you are forced to hurry it from your presence. It is the very opposite of _cleansing_. If you get a drop upon your finger, you immediately wash it off. Indeed, some persons cannot stand the sight of blood, and shrink from its touch as from a deadly poison. There must be some reason for the idea that in some way blood is suggestive of cleansing or purifying. Now, we go to _nature_ in search of knowledge. There is only one phenomenon in which the shedding of blood is a natural process, and that is when the young girl arrives at the stage of _pubescence_, and in this case, and in this case only, does it suggest the idea of _purification_. Before the period approaches nothing can be more suggestive of the untidy than the unpubescent girl. She is generally awkward, slouchy, and unattractive. But let the sanguineous evidence of approaching womanhood appear, and how changed! Her complexion becomes then most beautiful and bewitching. Her eyes sparkle with a fire which cannot be described. Her once ungraceful form becomes lithe, and her whole person changes in such a manner as to indicate that some great thing has happened. She has been purified or cleansed. She is a new creature. Old things have passed away. Each succeeding month she has a similar experience until the full bloom of womanhood has passed away.

Indeed, we find among the primitive customs of ancient Africans a special observance of the commencement of the catamenial period. Before the arrival of the time of periodicity the young girl is of very little account, and is not numbered as a member of the tribe. It is not considered indecent for her to run around in a state of nudity until she is fourteen years of age or until the evidence of pubescence appears. Stanley says of certain African girls: “They wait with impatience the day when they can be married and have a cloth to fold around their bodies.” There was in use among certain ancient people, now worn by Catholic priests, an apron known as the _peplum_, which was worn after puberty.

The tribal mark and totemic name were conferred in the _baptism of blood_. A covenant was entered into which was written with menstruous blood, because blood was the announcer of the female period of pubescence. From time immemorial the Kaffirs have preserved the custom of celebrating the first appearance of the menstrual flow. All the young girls in the neighborhood meet together and make merry on the happy occasion. We are told by Irenæus how the feminine _Logos_ was represented in the mysteries of Marcus, and the wine was supposed to be miraculously turned into blood, and Charis, who was superior to all things, was thought to infuse her own blood into the cup. The cup was handed to the women, who also consecrated it with an effusion of blood proceeding from themselves.

It would seem that the blood of Charis preceded the blood of Christ, and it is doubtful whether there would have been any cleansing by the blood of Christ if there had been no purification by the blood of Charis. Thus Nature’s rubrics are written in _red_. The Eucharist is derived by Clement of Alexandria from the mixture of the water and the Word, and he identifies the Word with the blood of the grape. We give these delicate hints for what they are worth.

We have a deep conviction that the conception of the idea of purification by blood had at first some connection with the natural issue of blood at the commencement of periodicity in the female. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, celebrated by pagans centuries before the paschal supper of the Jews or the Lord’s Supper of Christians, the element of blood was very conspicuously set forth, and Higgins has shown in his _Anaealypsis_ that the sacrifice of bread and wine in religious ceremonies was common among many ancient peoples, the wine representing the blood.

In 1885 a very remarkable book appeared, entitled _The Blood Covenant_, by Rev. H. Clay Trumbull, D. D., and we have obtained the consent of this author (whom we have the honor to recognize as an old and very dear personal friend) “to use anything we please, in any way we please, without giving any credit.” For this permission we are truly thankful, though we only avail ourself of a few of the facts bearing upon the point concerning which we write.

Our author says: “One of these primitive rites, which is deserving of more attention than it has yet received, as throwing light on many important phases of Bible-teaching, is the rite of blood-covenanting—a form of mutual covenanting by which two persons enter into the closest, the most enduring, and the most sacred of compacts as friends and brothers, or as more than brothers, through the intercommingling of their blood by means of its mutual tasting or of its transfusion. This rite is still observed in the unchanging East; and there are historic traces of it from time immemorial in every quarter of the globe, yet it has been strangely overlooked by biblical critics and biblical commentators generally in these later centuries.

“Although now comparatively rare, in view of its responsibilities and of its indissolubleness, this covenant is sometimes entered into by confidential partners in business or by fellow-travelers; again, by robbers on the road, who would themselves rest fearlessly on its obligations, and who could be rested on within its limits, however untrustworthy they or their fellows might be to any other compact. Yet, again, it is the chosen compact of loving friends—of those who are drawn to it only by mutual love and trust.

“There are, indeed, various evidences that the the of blood-covenanting is reckoned in the East even a closer tie than that of natural descent—that a ‘friend’ by this tie is nearer and is dearer, ‘sticketh closer’ than a ‘brother’ by birth. We in the West are accustomed to say that ‘ blood is thicker than water,’ but the Arabs have the idea that blood is thicker than a mother’s milk. With them, any two children nourished at the same breast are called ‘milk-brothers’ or ‘sucking brothers;’ and the tie between such is very strong.

“Lucian, the bright Greek thinker, writing in the middle of the second century of our era, is explicit as to the nature and method of this covenant as then practised in the East: ‘And this is the manner of it: Thereupon, cutting our fingers, all simultaneously, we let the blood drop into a vessel, and, having dipped the points of our swords into it, both of us holding them together, we drink it. There is nothing which can loose us from one another after that.’

“Yet, a little while earlier than Lucian, Tacitus gives record of this rite of blood-brotherhood as practised in the East. He makes an explanation: ‘It is the custom of Oriental kings, as often as they come together to make covenant, to join right hands, to tie the thumbs together, and to tighten them with a knot. Then, when the blood is thus pressed to the finger-tips, they draw blood by a light stroke and lick it in turn. This they regard as a divine covenant, made sacred, as it were, by mutual blood or blended lives.’

“Sallust, the historian of Catiline’s conspiracy against Rome, says: ‘There were those who said at that time that Catiline at this conference, when he inducted them into the oath of partnership in crime, carried round in goblets human blood mixed with wine, and that, after all had tasted of it with an imprecatory oath, as is men’s wont in solemn rites, he opened to them his plans.’ Florus, a later Latin historian, describing this conspiracy, says: ‘There was added the pledge of the league—human blood—which they drank as it was borne round to them in goblets.’ And yet later Tertullian suggests that it was their own blood, mingled with wine, of which the fellow-conspirators drank together. ‘Concerning the eating of blood and other such tragic dishes,’ he says, ‘you read that blood drawn from the arms and tasted by one another was the method of making covenant among certain nations.’

“As far back even as the fifth century before Christ we find an explicit description of this Oriental rite of blood-covenanting. ‘Now, the Scythians,’ says Herodotus, ‘make covenants in the following manner, with whomsoever they make them: Having poured out wine into a great earthen drinking-bowl, they mingle with it the blood of those making covenant, striking the body with a small knife or cutting it slightly with a sword. Thereafter they dip into the bowl sword, arrows, axe, and javelin. But while they are doing this they utter many invokings, and afterward not only those who make the covenant, but those of their followers who are of the highest rank, drink off the wine mingled with blood.’

“Again, Herodotus says of this custom in his day: ‘Now, the Arabians reverence in a very high degree pledges between man and man. They make these pledges in the following way: When they wish to make pledges to one another, a third man, standing in the midst of the two, cuts with a sharp stone the inside of the hands along the thumbs of the two making the pledges. After that, plucking some woollen from the garments of each of the two, he anoints with the blood seven stones as the “heap of witness” which are set in the midst. While he is doing this he invokes Dionysus and Urania. When this rite is completed, he that has made the pledges introduces the stranger to his friends, or the fellow-citizen to his fellows if the rite was performed with a fellow-citizen.

“Going back, now, to the world’s most ancient records in the monuments of Egypt, we find evidence of the existence of the covenant of blood in those early days. So far was this symbolic thought carried that the ancient Egyptians spoke of the departed spirit as having entered into the nature, and, indeed, into the very being, of the gods by the rite of tasting blood from the divine arm.

“‘The Book of the Dead,’ as it is commonly called, is a group, or series, of ancient Egyptian writings representing the state and the needs and the progress of the soul after death. A copy of this funereal ritual, ‘more or less complete according to the fortune of the deceased, was deposited in the case of eveiy mummy. ‘As the Book of the Dead is the most ancient, so it is undoubtedly the most important of the sacred books of the Egyptians;’ it is, in fact, ‘according to Egyptian notions, essentially an inspired work;’ hence its contents have an exceptional dogmatic value. In this book there are several obvious references to the rite of blood-covenanting. Some of these are in a chapter of the ritual which was found transcribed in a coffin of the eleventh dynasty, thus carrying it back to a period prior to the days of the patriarchs.

“‘Give me your arm; I am made as ye,’ says the departed soul, speaking to the gods. Then, in explanation of this statement, the pre-historic gloss of the ritual goes on to say: ‘The blood is that which proceeds from the member of the Sun after he goes along cutting himself,’ the covenant blood which unites the soul and the god is drawn from the flesh of Ra when he has cut himself in the rite of that covenant. By this covenant-cutting the deceased becomes one with the covenanting gods. Again, the departing soul, speaking as Osiris—or as the Osirian, which every mummy represents—says: ‘I am the soul in his two halves.’ This was at least two thousand years before the days of the Greek philosopher. How much earlier it was recognized does not appear.

“Moreover, a ‘red talisman,’ or red amulet, stained with ‘the blood of Isis,’ and containing a record of the covenant, was placed at the neck of the mummy as an assurance of safety to his soul. ‘When this book [this amulet-record] has been made,’ says the ritual, ‘it causes Isis to protect him.’ ‘If this book is known,’ says Horus, ‘he [the deceased] is in the service of Osiris.... His name is like that of the gods.’”

Dr. Trumbull properly remarks:

“Thus in ancient Egypt, in ancient Canaan, in ancient Mexico, in modern Turkey, in modern Russia, in modern India, and in modern Otaheite, in Africa, in Asia, in America, in Europe, and in Oceanica, blood-giving was life-giving. Life-giving was love-showing. Love-showing was a heart-yearning after union in love and in life and in blood and in very being. That was the primitive thought in the primitive religions of all the world.

“An ancient Chaldean legend, as recorded by Bero-sus, ascribes a new creation of mankind to the mixture by the gods of the dust of the earth with the blood that flowed from the severed head of the god Belus. ‘On this account it is that men are rational and partake of divine knowledge,’ says Berosus. The blood of the god gives them the life and nature of a god. Yet, again, the early Phœnician and the early Greek theogonies, as recorded by Sanchoniathon and by Hesiod, ascribe the vivifying of mankind to the outpoured blood of the gods. It was from the blood of Ouranos, or of Saturn, dripping into the sea and mingling with its foam, that Venus was formed, to become the mother of her heroic posterity. ‘The Orphies, which have borrowed so largely from the East,’ says Lenormant, ‘said that the immaterial part of man, his soul, his life, sprang from the blood of Dionysus Zagreus, whom... Titans had torn to pieces, partly devouring his members.’

“Homer explicitly recognizes this universal belief in the power of blood to convey life and to be a means of revivifying the dead.

“Indeed, it is claimed, with a show of reason, that the very word (_surquinu_) which was used for ‘altar’ in the Assyrian was primarily the word for ‘table’—that, in fact, what was known as the ‘altar’ to the gods was originally the table of communion between the gods and their worshippers.”

From the writings of Livingstone, the African explorer, as well as from the reports of Stanley, it appears that the custom of blood-covenanting is kept up in Africa in these modern times.

Describing the ceremony, Livingstone says: “It is accomplished thus: The hands of the parties are joined (in this case Pitsane and Sambanza were the parties engaged). Small incisions are made on the clasped hands, on the pits of the stomach of each, and on the right cheeks and foreheads. A small quantity of blood is taken from these points, in both parties, by means of a stalk of grass. The blood from one person is put into a pot of beer, and that of the second into another; each then drinks the other’s blood, and they are supposed to become perpetual friends or relations. During the drinking of the beer some of the party continue beating the ground with short clubs and utter sentences by way of ratifying the treaty.”

The primitive character of these customs is the more probable from the fact that Livingstone first found them existing in a region where, in his opinion, the dress and household utensils of the people are identical with those represented on the monuments of ancient Egypt.

Concerning the origin of this rite in this region, Cameron says: “This custom of making brothers, I believe to be really of Semitic origin.”

Henry M. Stanley, who was sent to rescue Livingstone, gives many interesting accounts of his experience with the blood-covenanters. In 1871, Stanley encountered the forces of Mirambo, the greatest of African warriors. They agreed to make “strong friendship” with each other. The ceremony is thus described:

“Manwa Sera, Stanley’s ‘chief captain,’ was requested to seal our friendship by performing the ceremony of blood-brotherhood between Mirambo and myself. Having caused us to sit fronting each other on a straw carpet, he made an incision in each of our right legs, from which he extracted blood, and, interchanging it, he exclaimed aloud, ’If either of you break this brotherhood now established between you, may the lion devour him, the serpent poison him, bitterness be in his food, his friends desert him, his gun burst in his hands and wound him, and everything that is bad do wrong to him until death.’” The same blood now flowed in the veins of both Stanley and Mirambo. They were friends and brothers in a sacred covenant—life for life. At the conclusion of the covenant they exchanged gifts, as the customary ratification or accompaniment of the compact. They even vied with each other in proofs of their unselfish fidelity in this new covenant of friendship.

Again and again, before and after this incident, Stanley entered into the covenant of blood-brotherhood with representative Africans more than fifty times, in some instances by the opening of his own veins; at other times by allowing one of his personal escort to bleed for him.

Thus we see that in ancient and modern times, among all people and in all portions of the earth, this idea of blood-friendship prevailed. In the primitive East, in the wild West, in the cold North, and in the torrid South this rite shows itself. “It will be observed,” says Dr. Trumbull, “that we have already noted proofs of the independent existence of this rite of blood-brotherhood or blood-friendship among the three great primitive divisions of the race—the Semitic, the Hamitic, and the Japhetic; and this in Asia, Africa, Europe, America, and the islands of the sea; again, among the five modern and more popular divisions of the human family—Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay, and American. This fact in itself would seem to point to a common origin of its various manifestations in the early Oriental home of the now scattered peoples of the world.

“The Egyptian amulet of blood-friendship was red, as representing the blood of the gods. The Egyptian word for ’red’ sometimes stood for ’blood.’ The sacred directions in the Book of the Dead were written in red; hence follows our word ‘rubric,’ The Rabbis say that when persecution forbade the wearing of the phylacteries with safety, a red thread might be substituted for this token of the covenant with the Lord. It was a red thread which Joshua gave to Rahab as a token of her covenant relations with the people of the Lord. The red thread in China to-day binds the double cup from which the bride and bridegroom drink their covenant draught of ‘wedding wine,’ as if in symbolism of the covenant of blood. And it is a red thread which in India to-day is used to bind a sacred amulet around the arm or the neck. Among the American Indians scarlet, or red, is the color which stands for sacrifices or for sacrificial blood in all their picture-painting; and the shrine, or _tunkan_, which continues to have its devotees, ’is painted red, as a sign of active or living worship.’ The same is true of the shrines in India; the color red shows that worship is still living there; red continues to stand for blood.”

When a Jewish child is circumcised, it is commonly said of him that he is caused “to enter into the covenant of Abraham and his godfather or sponsor is called Baal-beerith, master of the covenant.” Moreover, even down to modern times the rite of circumcision has included a recognition, however unconscious, of the primitive blood-friendship rite, by the custom of the a rabbi, God’s representative, receiving into his mouth the prepuce or foreskin that is cut from the boy, and thereby made a partaker of the blood mingled with the wine according to the method described among the Orientals, in the rite of blood-friendship, from the earliest days of history. We make this statement on the testimony of Buxtorf, who is a recognized authority in matters of Jewish customs, though he gives it in Latin, with a view of limiting a knowledge of the facts.

All that we have stated concerning the blood-covenant brings us nearer and nearer to the disgusting and beastly habit of cannibalism. Dr. Trumbull says: “It would even seem to be indicated, by all the trend of historic facts, that cannibalism—gross, repulsive, inhuman cannibalism—had its basis in man’s perversion of this outreaching of his nature (whether that outreach-ing were first directed by revelation or by divinely-given innate promptings) after inter-union and intercommunion with God, after life in God’s life, and after growth through the partaking of God’s food or of that food which represents God. The studies of many observers in widely-different fields have led both the rationalistic and the faith-filled student to conclude that in _their_ sphere of observation it was a religious sentiment, and not a mere animal craving—either through a scarcity of food or from a spirit of malignity—that was at the bottom of cannibalistic practices there, even if that field were an exception to the world’s fields generally. And now we have a glimpse of the nature and workings of that religious sentiment which prompted cannibalism wherever it has been practised. In misdirected pursuance of this thought men have given the blood of a consecrated human victim to bring themselves into union with God; and then they have eaten the flesh of that victim which had supplied the blood which made them one with God. This seems to be the basis of fact in the premises, whatever may be the understood philosophy of the facts. Why men reasoned thus may indeed be in question. That they reasoned thus seems evident. Certain it is, that where cannibalism has been studied in modern times it has commonly been found to have had originally a religious basis; and the inference is a fair one that it must have been the same wherever cannibalism existed in earlier times. Even in some regions where cannibalism has long since been prohibited there are traditions and traces of its former existence as a purely religious rite. Thus, in India little images of flour paste or clay are now made for decapitation or other mutilation in the temples, in avowed imitation of human beings who were once offered and eaten there.”

Réville, treating of the native religions of Mexico and Peru, comes to a similar conclusion with Dorman, and he argues that the state of things which was there was the same the world over, so for as it related to cannibalism. “Cannibalism,” he says, “which is now restricted to a few of the savage tribes who have remained closest to the animal life, was once universal to our race. For no one would ever have conceived the idea of offering to the gods a kind of food which excited nothing but disgust and horror.” In this suggestion Réville indicates his conviction that the primal idea of an altar was a table of blood-bought communion.

There is something that looks very much like cannibalism in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. The Jews murmured that Jesus spoke of himself as the bread which came down from heaven, and inquired, “How can this man give us of his flesh to eat? Jesus therefore said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me. This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers did eat, and died; he that eateth this bread shall live for ever. These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum.”

This was spoken nearly two years before he is said to have instituted the memorial Supper, and has always been a mystery to commentators, though they allege that the whole mystery is explained in John 6: 63:

“It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” This seems to be very farfetched indeed—an afterthought. It did not satisfy some of his disciples, for “from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.”

From this simple idea of securing faithfulness by the transfusion of the blood of two persons seems to have come the idea of _propitiating_ the gods by offering them bloody sacrifices. In primitive times, among barbarous and uncivilized peoples, the conception was universal that the gods were very much like themselves, and that therefore they would be pleased with presents. When offended they could be conciliated, and when some crime had been committed they could be induced to forgive the transgressor by some valuable offering, such as the first-fruits of the soil or the most immaculate animals of the flock. This idea of obtaining favors from the invisible powers was carried to such extremes that for the honor of humanity we should feel inclined to doubt the monstrous stories were they not so well attested. The offering of these sacrifices became so degraded and disgusting by superstition that it ended in the belief that the deity’s anger could be appeased, his revenge satisfied, his vanity flattered, and that he could be made generally pleased, by holocausts of human beings; so that the more costly the sacrifice, the more certain was the deity to smile upon the donor. The Moloch-worship, the mother placing the babe in the arms of the monstrous idol and seeing it burned before her own eyes, seems to exhaust the horrors of human ingenuity. We have only space to state that these abominations prevailed over most of the heathen world when the Old-Testament rites and ceremonies came into use among the Jews. We find the custom of offering sacrifices in the early pages of Genesis, when it led to the first murder. Cain’s sacrifice, sacerdotal-ists tell us, was not accepted by Jehovah because there was no _blood_ in it, as there was in the offering of Abel. Abraham was about to slay his own son when the blood of a ram was provided instead; and, in fact, all the Bible patriarchs sacrificed, and the exodus from Egypt itself was brought about under the pretence that the people had to go to the desert to offer their accustomed sacrifice.

The Jews borrowed their idea of sacrifice from the heathen, and sometimes were more heathenish than the heathens themselves. Thousands and thousands of innocent animals were cruelly butchered for sacrifice, as the Jews were full of Egyptian reminiscences on one hand and of Canaanitish modes of worship on the other. It is said that Jehovah allowed these abominations because of the ignorance of these people and their hardness of heart, lest they might despise a naked religion and be dazzled by the imposing ceremonies by which they were surrounded. The whole system of bloody sacrifices was based upon anthropomorphic conceptions of their Jehovah, to whom the “agreeable smell” of the blood was a sweet satisfaction. The Jews adopted the very worst features of paganism in regard to these bloody sacrifices, which they offered on all occasions—so much so that their prophets cried out against them and Jehovah himself denounced them.

The life or blood of the animal was distinctly said to make “the atonement for the soul.” This notion of a _representative_ victim is one that belonged to the whole ancient world, as can be seen by reference to any of the great cyclopaedias. It was _adopted_ by the Jews, not _revealed_ to them by Jehovah. The scape-goat (Lev. 16) and many other cases of seemingly expiatory sacrifices are embodiments of this idea, which was adopted by Christianity directly from Judaism, whose priests had adopted it from other people.

The practice of bloody offerings was common to Hindoos, Assyrians, Phœnicians, Greeks, and Northmen. There is a Hindoo ritual for human as well as for brute animals set forth in _Asiatic Researches_. In _Fragments of Sanchoniathon_, Kronos sacrifices his “only son” to his father Ouranos, his “father in heaven.” Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter, Iphigeneia,

before going to Troy, and Polyxena, daughter of Priam, was immolated on the tomb of Achilles to his manes. Repeatedly in the Punic wars children of noble families were burned alive to Æsculapius, god of medicine. Burning at the stake and hanging upon a gibbet were sacrifices to appease the divine justice. In short, all bloody sacrifices were propitiatory, to appease the rage of hunger in a famished god. Blood was excellent, because its aroma was the vehicle of life, and so afforded support to life.

In Homer’s _Odyssey_, Ulysses slays animals before the ghosts of Hades, and these run up to be nourished by the blood. He draws his sword, rushes upon them, and drives them away. Then, selecting one with whom he wishes to talk, he feeds him with the invigorating vapor, and the ghost is then made strong enough to talk.

But none of these sacrifices were strictly vicarious. The old gods were angry at neglect, but never had the kind of justice that a sheep or goat or cow could not appease. The Jews were not unfamiliar with human sacrifices (Lev. 27:28,29; Judg. 11:30-39), and even the early Christians are said to have offered bloody sacrifices of human beings. The deification of Jesus to correspond with the apotheosis of other personages required a divine parentage. This idea was not gotten up until the second Christian century. Justin made Jesus a second god. But the earlier Fathers did not connect the notion of the vicarious atonement with that of original sin and total depravity. Basilides maintained that penal suffering or suffering for purposes of justice of necessity implies personal criminality in the sufferer, and therefore cannot be endured by an innocent person as a substitute.

Prof. Robertson Smith, LL.D., in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, in his learned article on “Sacrifice," says part: “Where we find a practice of sacrificing honorific gifts to the gods, we usually find also certain other sacrifices which resemble those already characterized, to be consumed in sacred ceremony, but differ from them, inasmuch as the sacrifice—usually a living victim—is not regarded as a tribute of honor to the god, but has a special or mystic significance. The most familiar case of this second species of sacrifice is that which the Romans distinguished from the _hostia honoraria_ by the name of _hostia piacularis_. In the former case the deity accepts a gift; in the latter, he demands a life. The former kind of sacrifice is offered by the worshipper on the basis of an established relation of friendly dependence on his divine lord; the latter is directed to appease the divine anger or to conciliate the favor of a deity on whom the worshipper has no right to count” (vol. xxi. p.. 132).

_Piamlar Sacrifices_.—“The idea of substitution is widespread among all early religions, and is found in honorific as well as piacular rites. In all such cases the idea is that the substitute shall imitate as closely as is possible or convenient the victim whose place it supplies; and so in piacular ceremonies the god may indeed accept one life for another, or certain select lives to atone for the guilt of a whole community; but these lives ought to be of the guilty kin, just as in blood-revenge the death of any kinsman of the manslayer satisfies justice. Hence such rites as the Semitic sacrifices of children by their fathers [Moloch], the sacrifice of Iphigeneia and similar cases among the Greeks, inasmuch as something is given up by the worshippers nor the offering up of boys to the goddess Mania at Rome....

“In advanced societies the tendency is to modify the horrors of the ritual, either by accepting an effusion of blood without actually slaying the victim—e. g. in the flagellation of the Spartan lads—or by a further extension of the doctrine of substitution: the Romans, for example, substituted puppets for the human sacrifices to Mania, and cast rush dolls into the Tiber, at the yearly atoning sacrifice on the Sublician Bridge. More usually, however, the life of an animal is accepted by the god in place of a human life.... Among the Egyptians the victim was marked with a seal bearing the image of a man bound and kneeling with a sword at his throat. And often we find a ceremonial laying of the sin to be expiated on the head of the victim (Herod, ii. 39; Lev. 4: 4, compared with 14: 21).

“In such piacular rites the god demands only the life of the victim, which is sometimes indicated by a special ritual with the blood (as among the Hebrews the blood of the sin-offering was applied to the horns of the altar or to the mercy-seat within the veil), and there is no sacrificial meal. Thus, among the Greeks the carcase of the victim was buried or cast into the sea [comp, with most important Hebrew sin-offerings and sacrifice of children to Moloch—outside the camp or city].

“When the flesh of the sacrifice is consumed by the priests, as with certain Roman piacula and Hebrew sin-offerings, the sacrificial flesh is seemingly a gift accepted by the deity and assigned by him to the priests, so that the distinction between a honorific and a piacular sacrifice is partly obliterated. But this is not hard to understand; for just as a blood-rite takes the place of blood-revenge in human justice, so an offence against the gods may in certain cases be redeemed by a fine (e. g. Herod, ii. 65) or a sacrificial gift. This seems to have been the origin of the Hebrew _trespass-offering_ (p. 136).

“The most curious developments of piacular sacrifice take place in the worship of deities of the totem type. Here the natural substitute for the death of a criminal of the tribe is an animal of the kind with which the worshippers and their god alike count kindred—an animal, that is, which must not be offered in a sacrificial feast, and which indeed it is impious to kill. Thus, Hecaté was invoked as a dog, and dogs were her piacular sacrifices. And in like manner in Egypt the piacular sacrifice of the cow-goddess Isis-Hathor was a bull, and the sacrifice was accompanied by lamentations as at the funeral of a kinsman.”

Under the head of _Mystical or Sacramental Sacrifices_—i. e. sacrifices at initiations and in the _Mysteries_: “According to Julian, the mystical sacrifices of the cities of the Roman empire were... offered once or twice a year, and consisted of such victims as the dog of Hecaté, which might not ordinarily be eaten or used to furnish forth the tables of the gods.... The mystic sacrifices seem always to have had an atoning efficacy; their special feature is that the victim is not simply slain and burned or cast away, but that the worshippers partake of the body and blood of the sacred animal, and that so his life passes, as it were, into their lives and knits them to the deity in living communion.

“In the Old Testament the heathen mysteries seem to appear as ceremonies of initiation by which a man was introduced into a new worship.... But originally the initiation must have been introduction into a particular social community.... From this point of view the sacramental rites of mystical sacrifice are a form of blood-covenant.... In all the forms of blood-covenant, whether a sacrifice is offered or the veins of the parties opened and their own blood used, the idea is the same: the bond created is a bond of kindred, because one blood is now in the veins of all who have shared the ceremony.”

A learned friend writes me: “I doubt whether a real distinction can be made between _propitiatory and expiatory_ sacrifices. Propitiation is by expiation. The basic idea in all sacrifices of that nature appears to be _substitution_; that is, something taking the place of the offender.... It seems that the basis of all sacrifice is to be found in a relationship, or _kinship_ (through blood), between the deity—who is only the representative of the tribal head regarded as still living in the spirit-world—and the worshipper.

“I may add that the idea of pollution by wrongdoing—i. e. offending the tribal deity—to be got rid of only by the shedding of blood, is not unknown to so-called savages. This applies especially to offences against chastity, as with the Mâlers of Rajmahal, India, and the Dyaks of Borneo. The pig is the animal usually sacrificed—probably because it is the most valuable animal food. The Pâdam Abors of Assam look upon all crimes as public pollutions which require to be washed away by a public sacrifice. Here we have the idea of cleansing by the application of blood, and this appears to be the idea also with the Mâlers, and probably among the aboriginal hill-tribes of India generally.”

Mommsen, the Roman historian, says: “At the very core of the Latin religion there lay that profound moral impulse which leads men to bring earthly guilt and earthly punishment into relation with the world of the gods, and to view the former as a crime against the gods, and the latter as its expiation. The execution of the criminal condemned to death was as much an expiatory sacrifice offered to the divinity as was the killing of an enemy in just war; the thief who by night stole the fruits of the field paid the penalty to Ceres on the gallows, just as the enemy paid it to mother earth and the good spirits on the field of battle. The fearful idea of substitution also meets us here: when the gods of the community were angry, and nobody could be laid hold of as definitely guilty, they might be appeased by one who voluntarily gave himself up (_devovere se_).”

But it was left for Anselm of Canterbury, late in the eleventh century, to first formulate the doctrine of vicarious atonement. Before this there seemed to be among the theologians the idea that in some way Christ came to restore, at least in part, all that was lost in Adam. During the first four centuries of the Christian era there seems to have been no fixed opinion as to whether there was a ransom-price paid to God or the devil. Under the article “Devil " in the Encyclopœdia Britannica it is said:

“He [the devil] was, according to Cyprian (_De Unitate Ecd_.), the author of all heresies and delusions: he held man by reason of his sin in rightful possession, and man could only be rescued from his power by the ransom of Christ’s blood. This extraordinary idea of a payment or satisfaction to the devil being made by Christ as the price of man’s salvation is found both in Irenæus (Adv. Hcer., v. 1. 1.) and in Origen, and may be said to have held its sway in the Church for a thousand years. And yet Origen is credited with the opinion that, bad as the devil was, he was not altogether beyond hope of pardon."

It would be tedious to note the various views that have prevailed among theologians to the present day. Some hold that the offering was made to God to satisfy divine justice; others hold that it was a commercial transaction—so much blood for so many souls; and still others regard the whole as a governmental display to impress the world with a sense of the hatefulness of sin. Calvinists seem to think that the atonement was only made for the elect, but that the blood of Christ had sufficient merit to save the whole world. Roman Catholics hold that it is the literal, material blood of Christ that saves the sinner, and hence their extreme belief in the dogma of _transubstantiation_, the real body and blood of Jesus being offered in the sacrifice of the Mass, and taken by the penitent in the Holy Communion. Protestants generally hold to a sort of consubstantiation—a sort of real presence in the sacrament; while persons of intelligence profess to believe that this whole theory of blood-salvation is only to be accepted in a figurative sense. The fact is, that the whole scheme of vicarious atonement is an ancient superstition, though taught in the New Testament, and is absurd and unphilosophical, and false in principle and in practice, as we shall hereafter show.

We leave altogether out of view the logical conclusion that if the blood shed by Jesus was the blood of a man, it could have had no more efficacy than the blood of any other human being, and that if the blood shed was the blood of a God, the very mention of the thought is absurd and blasphemous in the extreme. It is nonsense to say that it was the union of the divine with the human nature that gave the blood of Christ its peculiar efficacy—that the altar sanctifies the gift for if the blood was changed by the man being united with the God, it was not human blood, but the blood of a divine man.

Now, there is no evidence that the blood of Jesus (supposing that he was crucified) differed in its essential qualities from other human blood. If analyzed by the chemist, it would have been found to contain only the constituent particles which belong to human blood. The white and red corpuscles and other chemical properties would have been found in it.

_The dogma of blood-salvation as held by Romanists is cannibalism, pure and simple, and as held by Protestants it is sheer superstition, without one grain of reason to support it._ It has no analogy in nature, nor in the philosophy of legal jurisprudence as held and practised by the most enlightened nations of the world.

It seems to us that the doctrine of vicarious atonement is not only immoral, but demoralizing. It represents God as punishing the innocent for the guilty to make it possible to forgive the guilty. This is inconsistent with the eternal principles of justice and rightfulness. It must have a demoralizing influence upon the mind and conscience of the sinner, to be told that his sins are already atoned for, and he only need to be cleansed by the blood of Christ; and this is to be obtained by simple faith and trust! Believe that Jesus shed his blood for you, and that he is waiting and anxious to apply it in washing away your guilt, and it is done! Then as often as you sin afterward you need only go through the same process to secure pardon! The easiness with which sins may be blotted out and washed away must have a demoralizing influence upon uneducated minds, though truly intelligent persons may not reason in this way. The low state of morals among those who really believe in this device for the forgiveness of sins may thus be accounted for. The numerous defalcations and downright thefts among the higher classes of Christians, and the petty lying and stealing among the great mass of Catholics and Protestants, are notorious, and can be traced, we think, to the easy methods of getting rid of the consequencees of wrong-doing. Our prison-statistics are truly suggestive, and should be carefully studied. Freethinkers are far in advance of Christians in the matter of practical morality. Many of those whom the courts exclude as witnesses, because they do not accept certain religious dogmas, are pre-eminently truthful, and would sooner die than tell a falsehood. They do not rely upon the blood of Jesus to wash away the vilest sins and make them white as snow.

Our statesmen are beginning to find out that our system of _pardon_ is most pernicious. To relieve from the consequences of wrong-doing through a divine contrivance of the vicarious sufferings of an innocent person, and that human disobedience is made all right as to consequences by this obedience of a divine-human person, does not commend itself to the intelligence of this nineteenth century. The answer of theologians to this charge is familiar and specious enough, but it is not practically accepted by the common people. When a child enters the Sunday-school room, and his eyes rest upon the conspicuous placard, “_Jesus Paid it All_” the natural inference is there is nothing more to pay, nothing to do but to accept the free gift.

Thousands of ignorant persons, Catholics and Protestants, no doubt secretly accept and rely upon this easy device to cover up their numerous shortcomings and misdoings. This doctrine is a welcome one in the murderer’s cell and upon the platform of the gallows. In thousands of uncultivated minds the thought is no doubt deeply hidden that about the surest way to get to heaven is to commit a murder and have the “benefit of clergy,” and in due time to be “jerked to Jesus” (as described by a Western journal) by the hangman’s rope. Why should it not be so? The vicarious atonement has been made, and is being made in the Mass, and they have only to accept it. Two priests or ministers actually opposed the postponement of the execution of a certain murderer on the ground that he then believed in Jesus, but that if execution was postponed they did not know that he would continue to “believe,” and that his soul might thus be lost!

Suppose that our State authorities should proclaim in advance free pardon and a princely palace to all lawbreakers on the simple condition of trusting in the mediatorial interposition and substitution of another, _already made and accepted_; what would be the effect on public morals? The system of redemption and pardon set forth in the New Testament is infinitely more than this, and must be demoralizing. All public officers know the evil effects of the pardon system, and how even the faintest hope of pardon encourages crime, and how certainly a free pardon is almost sure to be followed by a life of increased criminality.

There should be no such thing as pardon in our State jurisprudence—no “board of pardons” and no “exercise of the executive clemency.” If a convict is believed to have been wrongly imprisoned, or by after-discovered evidence is found to be innocent, let no “pardon board” or “executive” interfere, but let the case go back to the court that convicted him or to one of like jurisdiction, and let the case be judicially reviewed in the light of evidence; and if the accused is found innocent, let him be honorably acquitted, or if guilty remanded to prison.

There is nothing in reason, philosophy, or science that approves the theologie method of dealing with offenders. It violates every principle of justice, and has not one single quality of rightfulness in it. It is a fiction pure and simple, in form and in fact. Macaulay well said of this redemptive scheme, “It resembles nothing so much as a forged bond, with a forged release endorsed upon its back.” Gregg pungently put it thus: “It looks very much like an impossible debt paid in inconceivable coin; or a legal fiction purely gratuitous got rid of by what looks like a legal chicanery purely fanciful. It gives unworthy conceptions of God as one delighting in the blood of human beings, and even suggests the disgusting practices of cannibalism. It is a relic of the ancient barbaric fetichism borrowed from savages by sacerdotalists for purposes of priestcraft, and should be scouted by all honest and intelligent men.”

The severely orthodox Rev. Professor Shedd, as well as Dr. Priestley, admits that there was no scientific construction of the doctrine of the atonement in the writings of the apostolic Fathers (_Hist, of Doc._, vol. ii., p. 208). The doctrine was evidently manufactured when the Romish Church was evolved out of the innumerable sects of early Christendom, and was enforced by wholesale excommunication of dissenters and the death penalty. Christianity was planted in Germany, Prussia, and Sweden by military power. The Saxons were “converted” by Charlemagne. All the secret religions have a god or demi-god put to death. Even the Freemasons have Hiram Abiff. The death of Osiris was the central point in the Egyptian system. He was killed by Seth or Typhon, and returned to life as Rat-Amenti, the judge. In Egypt, Christianity moulded its doctrines of the Trinity, atonement, and “mother of God.” The Osirian theology was grafted on the Christian stock, if indeed the Christian system was not an evolution of Osirianism; and of this the monstrous concoction known as _vicarious atonement_ was made, and thrust down men’s throats by threats of hell and the visits of the executioner.

We might extend our remarks upon this subject indefinitely, but we have not space. We have seen that _blood-salvation_ did not originate with either Jews or Christians. Dr. Trumbull has proved this over and over again, and Kurtz, an orthodox writer, has admitted this fact. He says: “A comparison of the religious symbols of the Old Testament with those of ancient heathendom shows that the ground and the starting-point of those forms of religion which found their appropriate expressions in symbols was the same in all cases; while the history of civilization proves that on this point priority cannot be claimed by the Israelites. But when instituting such an inquiry we shall also find that the symbols which were transferred from the religions of nature to that of the spirit first passed through the fire of divine purification, from which they issued as the distinctive theology of the Jews, the dross of a pantheistic deification of nature having been consumed.” All this is very frank, but we should not overlook the fact, so clearly established, that this doctrine of cleansing blood, so constantly taught in the New Testament and proclaimed from every orthodox pulpit in the land, was not a _divine revelation_ specially made to Jews or Christians, but has been adopted and modified from the religions of nature, celebrated in all parts of the world by the most barbarous peoples in the remotest periods of time. Indeed, the more gross and savage the people, the more disgusting has been this doctrine of _blood-salvation_.

Dr. Trumbull could only think of two possible ways of explaining these marvellous things: “How it came to pass that men everywhere were so generally agreed on the main symbols of their religious yearnings, and their religious hopes in this realm of their aspirations, is a question which obviously admits of two possible answers. A common revelation from God may have been given to primitive man, and all these varying yet related indications of religious strivings and aim may be but the perverted remains of the lessons of that misused or slighted revelation. On the other hand, God may originally have implanted the germs of a common religious thought in the mind of man, and then have adapted his successive revelations to the outworking of those germs. Whichever view of the probable origin of these common symbolisms, all the world over, be adopted by any Christian student, the importance of the symbolisms themselves, in their relation to the truths of revelation, is manifestly the same."... “Because the primitive rite of blood-covenanting was well known in the lands of the Bible at the time of the writing of the Bible, for that very reason we are not to look to the Bible for a specific explanation of the rite itself, even where there are incidental references in the Bible to the rite and its observances; but, on the other hand, we are to find an explanation of the biblical illustrations of the primitive rite in the understanding of that rite which we gain from outside sources."

These assumptions are very flimsy stuff upon which to found the most prominent and mysterious doctrine of the orthodox Christian religion, making it the Alpha and Omega of the whole “_scheme of redemption_” To witness the mummeries of Roman Catholic priests and the manipulations of Protestant ministers in the celebration of the “Eucharistic Feast” or “Holy Communion” is enough to lead a truly intelligent man to wonder why these celebrants do not laugh each other in the face. Even our Universalist and Unitarian ministers sometimes indulge in this heathen diversion, though some of them deeply feel the absurdity of the rite, and the consequent humiliation to which they are subjected. Nevertheless, some of our most profound statesmen, when about to die, call in a priest, Catholic or Protestant, to administer the heathen ordinance. When will the world open its blind eyes, and learn that all that God requires of men is to “walk humbly, love mercy, and deal justly”?

There is no difficulty in accepting the words of a God who is said to have uttered the burning reproof to ritualists and hypocrites as follows: “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices? I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. And when you spread your hands I will hide mine eyes from you, yea, you make many prayers I will not hear, your hands are full of blood. Wash ye, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widows.”

This doctrine of _bloodsalvation_ is, in our judgment, most unphilosophical and even absurd. It originated, as we have shown, in the most gross and anthropomorphic conceptions of God, and its solemn celebration in orthodox churches is inseparable from the most ignorant and superstitious rites of the most savage peoples. Its tendency must be demoralizing.